I strongly encourage you to view this video. It should be a wake up call especially considering that one in seven Americans experiences hunger (now so conveniently called «food insecurity») and by any reasonable definition of poverty (mine is 50% of the median income level) over 20% of all Americans would be considered poor.

I thought that I would entertain you a bit while we wait for my novel to become a best seller, which might take a while. But on a more serious note. I play once a week for residents on an Alzheimer’s floor at a local nursing home.

I would like to encourage musicians, amateurs like myself, and more professionals to consider doing what I do and get in touch with a local nursing home. I can assure you that it will be a very satisfying experience.

Ted Cruz was interviewed on Norwegian television and I want to thank him for clearing up the cause of the massive job loss in the United States. His conclusion was simply: «The number one job killer in America is Obamacare.» The only trouble I have with this, Ted, is that The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was not passed and is still not fully implemented, long after the job meltdown began. From this side of the Atlantic, it is mystifying how much disinformation is disseminated in the United States, not to menion how many people swallow it. Another thing that puzzles me is how you, as a U.S. Senator, can enjoy a tax payer funded health care plan, while trying to deny one to average Joes.

At least the United States doesn’t. They do a good job of producing enemies at home, enough to eventually bring down the whole country. When banks are saved and people lose their homes and the fat cats who brought on the crisis are «too big to jail,» then we already have a great start. When salaries stagnate over 30 years for productive workers, so productive that people at the top pocket huge profits, then who needs foreign enemies? When the wealth is so maldistributed that one family owns as much wealth as one-third of all Americans and that the upper 1% owns 40% of the total wealth, well foreign enemies can just sit back and wait for the implosion. They know that inequality will eventually bring down the U.S. as Josepth Stiglitz has clearly documented in his The Price of Inequality. When right-wing loonies feel that the tax cuts given to the upper uppers by another right wing loony from the same state as Loony Numéro Uno in the Senate, and then try to block raising the deficit ceiling, which could have been avoided by an equitable tax system, then what’s to need of foreign enemies. An interesting footnote is that the two Bushleaguers and Reagan raised the national debt $9.1 trillion and the debt ceiling time after time. Nothing wrong with a bit of hypocriscy, n’est-pas? But if the U.S. does need foreign enemies, they are well on their way to getting a bushel full by spying on foreign leaders. So when history looks back on these developments, historians will only have one conclusion. They will add one nation to Toynbee’s famous conclusion that most great nations have declined from within.